(1944) He is head of the Climate Analysis Section at NCAR and was a lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC Scientific Assessments of Climate Change.
In addition, he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2000, awarded the Jule G. Charney Award from the American Meteorological Society, and the NCAR Distinguished Achievement Award in 2003.

Why he supports the AGW thesis

“The major cause of warming in the last three decades is from human effects changing the composition of the atmosphere primarily through use of fossil fuels. While changes in particulate pollution mostly causes cooling, increases in long-lived greenhouse gases dominate and cause warming.

The long lifetime of several greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide lasts for over a century) suggests that we can not stop the changes, although we can slow them down. Moreover, the slow response of the oceans to warming, means that we have not yet seen all of the climate change we are already committed to.

Major climate changes are projected under all likely scenarios of the future and the rates of change are much greater than occur naturally, and so are likely to be disruptive."

This type of thing is uncomfortably hilarious. Trenberth is one of the world's top climate scientists and he's being interogated by a guy who probably doesn't know whether or not CO2 is a molecule. In addition, he has been pitted against Ebell, a highly professional spin doctor who's been working the media for decades.

Watch Trenberth flinch when Ebell starts refering to his collegues as gangsters "without honour" or "sense of shame" who've been "cooking" and "falsifying" the data. But he keeps smiling. The question I have is: Why bother doing this kind interview?

(Lecture) Monitoring and Prediction of the Earth's Climate: A Future Perspective

(56 minutes)
This December 07, 2004 talk is based on a presentation given at the CLIVAR (Climate Variability and Predictability) 2004 conference. The aims and goals of the World Climate Research Programme's program COPES are summarized.
Click here to listen to it.

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